


the people who care

by fabrega



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 18:37:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18675229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: "You wanted me, you got me. And here I am, and there you are."Spoilers for Endgame





	the people who care

**Author's Note:**

> Set directly after Endgame, so, obviously, SPOILERS.
> 
> Thanks a million to smarshtastic for the beta and for putting up with me dropping snippets of this on her with no warning. ♥

Sam comes back to Bucky with the shield on his arm and a gobsmacked look on his face. He shifts on his feet, obviously trying to work out a new sense of balance now that he has the shield--both literally and figuratively, if Bucky had to guess.

Bucky raises an eyebrow. "Cap."

"Don't even fucking start with me, Barnes, now is _not_ the time." Sam rolls his eyes.

"What do you--I'm happy for you, idiot. You think I wanted that thing?" Bucky gestures at the shield. "No way. There is no way in hell that I'd be a good Captain America. It's not for...it's not for people like me."

Something on Sam's face softens, and god, does Bucky hate _that_ look. He crosses his arms and scowls.

Sam laughs. "We both know that's not true, man, but whatever you need to tell yourself."

"You're full of shit, Wilson," Bucky says, laughing too. 

The laughter trails off as Bucky looks over at Steve. Sam's quiet for a minute, and Bucky's unwilling to look away to see if Sam is looking at Steve or at him.

Sam nudges him with the shield. "You gonna talk to him?"

"Something like that," Bucky mutters. He doesn't move towards Steve yet, just stands, looking, his stomach churning. He's not sure what he's waiting for.

It looks like Steve's been waiting a lot longer.

"Take your time," Sam says, gently, and that might not have been the sign that Bucky was waiting for, but it's certainly enough to spur him into action. He glares at Sam and makes his way over to Steve.

Steve looks up at him from the bench where he's sitting, something that could be mistaken for tenderness in his gaze. His voice cracks a little as he says, "Buck--"

And that's when Bucky punches him in the jaw. He uses his flesh hand, but the force of the hit still knocks Steve sideways off of the bench. Bucky hears Sam yelp, hears Hulk make a kind of strangled noise from somewhere further away. Steve waves away whatever help it is they're offering, staring up at Bucky from the ground.

"Buck, it's me," Steve says, the same plaintive tone in his voice that Bucky remembers--like Bucky has _forgotten_ him again, like that's even possible.

"I know it's you, asshole."

Steve shakes his head, massaging his jaw. "Well then, hell of a right hook, pal."

"You should see the left one." Bucky sighs and offers Steve a hand up. When Steve is back on the bench, Bucky takes a seat next to him. Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky _watches_ Steve decide not to ask again, watches the process play out across his face. Bucky's impressed--it's only taken, what, a hundred and sixty years for him to learn a little bit of patience.

They sit in it for a minute, Bucky almost relishing how antsy it's making Steve, before he finally speaks. "You've always been a selfish son of a bitch, Rogers, but this really takes the cake."

Steve blinks at him, but still doesn't say anything. Honestly, how long did it take Peggy to train him to do that?

"I know you don't _think_ that you're selfish, most of the time," Bucky says. He looks out at the lake instead of at Steve. It seems safer; being unable to resist Steve Rogers' fucking doe eyes is the story of his entire fucking life, and he can't take that risk, not with this. "I know you think that your whole life has been self-sacrifice, everybody else before yourself. I _know_ you; when you took the Carter Exit on the time highway, you were probably thinking to yourself, _finally, my turn to be selfish._ "

"I mean, yeah," Steve says quietly.

"But you've always been selfish. You always did and got exactly what you wanted. How many years did you spend throwing yourself into what you wanted, into harm's way, without thinking about how it might affect the people who cared about you?"

Steve chuckles, a little uncomfortably. "Most of them, I think."

Bucky nods. "You know, first time I meet Peggy Carter, first story she tells me? The one from basic training where you jumped on a goddamn grenade. She told it to me like I ought to be proud of you, and all I could think about is what on earth I would've done with myself if you'd exploded in New Jersey."

"I didn't--"

"You didn't think about it, I know. You never have, you've always just done it." Bucky finally looks over at Steve, and yep, there are the fucking doe eyes. He looks like Bucky kicked his puppy--but _Bucky_ isn't the one who's done anything wrong here.

"I take it that I hurt the people who care about me this time too." Steve is being deliberately obtuse; there's no way he doesn't know what Bucky's mad about.

Well, two can play at that game. "What happened to Peggy's husband?"

Steve gives him a confused look. " _I'm_ Peggy's husband."

"No," Bucky says, shaking his head. "Peggy's _actual_ husband, the one she talked about in that video they played at your museum exhibit. You saved him, in the war."

Steve gives him another look, this one somewhere between suspicious and amused.

"Look, you were the only lead I had on who I was and your face was on every third billboard I saw, of course I was gonna go to your dumb exhibit. That's not the point." Bucky crosses his arms, makes a face. "The point is that Peggy had a life before you, a husband, a family. What happened to them?"

It looks like Steve hadn't ever considered this, which is honestly ridiculous, because Bucky knows for a fact that Steve had gone to his own dumb exhibit too. Steve says, a little unsure, "Maybe I was her husband the whole time? Because of time travel?"

 _Because of time travel._ Jesus. "You don't really believe that."

"I don't really believe that." Steve shakes his head. "I changed the past, and I know it. I can apologize for that, if you want. But I'm pretty sure you didn't punch me in the jaw because of Peggy's husband."

"You're here, like this," Bucky gestures at Steve, "And I'm here, like this. _Still_."

Realization dawns on Steve's face.

"You wanted me back so badly that you broke into a HYDRA camp alone to rescue me. You wanted me back so badly that you broke through my brainwashing through sheer force of will. You wanted me back so badly that you chased me halfway around the world. I thought maybe I could have a nice life somewhere, hang up the arm, settle down, eat some local fruit, try to forget all the shit I did, but no. You wanted me, you got me. And here I am, and there you are." Bucky is afraid to stop talking long enough for Steve to get a word in, long enough for Steve to apologize. "You read the Winter Soldier's file. You knew where I was, and what they were doing to me. Did you ever think about getting me out of there?"

The look Steve gives him is helpless, heartbreaking.

"You changed Peggy's life. Why couldn't you change mine?"

Bucky stands, turns to leave--but Steve grabs his wrist, and Bucky stops up short.

"Please, Buck."

"You gonna answer my question?" Bucky asks through gritted teeth.

"No," Steve says, "I can't. There's no excuse I could give you that would make it any better, and even if I had a good excuse, I wouldn't expect you to listen to it."

They stand there like that for a second, Bucky pulling away, Steve refusing to let him go. Just like old times, then.

"Guess this is the end of the line, pal," Bucky says. 

He hears the hissing breath Steve sucks in, feels Steve's fingers tighten on his wrist. "We have a time machine. This doesn't--we can send you back to before I leave to return the Stones, have you punch me in the face again."

Bucky smiles despite himself. "C'mon, we both know that if you have your mind set on something, getting punched in the face hasn't ever been enough to stop you." He sits back down, because god, he is a sucker. 

"We have a time machine," Steve tries again. He hasn't let go of Bucky yet. "You don't have to stay here."

"Yeah, I do. When else could I go?" Bucky lifts his left arm, flexes the vibranium fingers. "Not a lot of places I fit in. Besides, somebody's gotta keep Captain America from doing anything too stupid, and I got the most experience, so, y'know."

"Sam'll be lucky to have you," Steve says. He smiles a melancholy smile. It makes Bucky _ache_.

"Damn right he will." There's a pause, and Bucky realizes that Steve _still_ hasn't let go of him. He turns his hand over, curls his fingers around Steve's. His voice, when he speaks, is quiet. "Romanov told me once that she was glad we'd found each other. Told me you'd been out of place in the future, that you were mooning around trying to find somebody with 'shared life experience'. I told her I knew the feeling."

Steve chuckles.

"You're...you're what I've got here. I love you. I don't know why I thought that would be enough."

Steve laces their fingers together. "It should've been. It really should've been."

*

Steve comes back to the half-rebuilt Avengers compound with them, back to the suite of rooms that he and Sam and Bucky have been sharing. Word must have gotten around how Bucky reacted to this whole ordeal, because the others give them a wide berth--Bucky notices them gawking, it's impossible not to notice, but everyone leaves them to...whatever it is that they're doing.

Bucky's not sure what it is that they're doing, to be honest. He half-expected Steve go to back to whatever life it was he'd been living. He's not an Avenger anymore; he's made that incredibly clear. But Steve settles back into his room like it hasn't been more than fifty years for him, like--

Like any of this is going to be okay.

Steve turns in early, and Bucky isn't far behind him. He knows that if he stays up, Sam is going to try to make him _talk_ about it, and even though Sam would take no for an answer, Bucky just wants to avoid the topic altogether. He doesn't know what he would even say. The things he thought he knew got pulled out from under him, again--what _is_ there to say?

He wakes up to someone banging on his bedroom door. When he looks at the clock on the bedside table, it's three o'clock in the goddamn morning, so he is not surprised to hear Steve's voice accompanying the knocking. He waits to see if it will go away, debates just shoving his head under a pillow and trying to go back to sleep, but eventually crawls out of bed to see what Steve could possibly want.

"Buck," he says breathlessly when Bucky answers the door, "I figured it out. We have a _time machine_."

Bucky hides a yawn with his metal hand. _That's_ what couldn't wait until morning? "Yeah, and I can't use it to stop you and I can't use it to join you, that pretty much covers all our options."

Steve looks at him, an excited glint in his eye. "Not if we use it wrong."

"What?"

"I didn't remember until just now. Back when we were still trying to get it working, before we had the regulator bracelets, we accidentally used it to...how did Tony put it?" Steve looks up and away, thinking. "We moved time through Scott, instead of moving Scott through time. I could be whatever age we wanted. _You_ could be whatever age we wanted."

Bucky gives him a suspicious look. "So, what, you and me, sitting on a porch somewhere in rocking chairs, finally looking our age? Or you as Captain America again?"

"Oh, Sam is Captain America now, I can't take that back. I think I'd have to fight him for the shield, and I'm in no shape to do that." Steve laughs. "But as for the rest of it, what do _you_ want?"

A giddy joy bubbles up in Bucky's chest, in a way it hasn't in a long, long time. " _You_ , Steve. I want _you_. I always have."

Steve lights up. "I think we can probably manage that."

Bucky laughs in disbelief, pulls Steve in close for a hug. It can't be that easy. Can it really be that easy? "Exactly how many happy endings do you think your story gets to have, pal?"

"Haven't you heard?" Steve grins at him, pressing their foreheads together, so close in Bucky's space. It's exactly where Bucky wants to be. "I'm a selfish son of a bitch. I'll take all the happy endings I can get."

*

("So," Sam says, when everything has gone back to as close to normal as it can, "You guys wanna take turns being Captain America, or...")

**Author's Note:**

> the working title for this fic was _the one where Bucky Barnes punches an old man in the face_ and I'm so sad it couldn't be the title here too


End file.
